Volume 5 · Number 2

This paper examines how culture, storytelling, folklore, art, music, literature, and collective memory can inform disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction. Rather than relying only on top-down expert strategies, it explores how disaster-prone communities interpret hazards through local narratives and cultural practices. The analysis shows that storytelling and commemoration help communities contextualize disaster experience and suggests that disaster policy should be more attentive to place-specific history, indigenous knowledge, and cultural meaning.

This study examines the role of social capital in earthquake preparedness, response, and recovery in Tehran, Iran. Using secondary analysis of large municipal surveys, it evaluates bonding and bridging social capital across Tehran’s districts. The findings reveal low to moderate bonding social capital and generally weak bridging social capital, highlighting an important social dimension that is often overshadowed by physical infrastructure approaches. The paper recommends policies that strengthen social cohesion, generalized trust, and community networks.

Focusing on indigenous communities in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts, this study investigates the causes and consequences of climate-related water scarcity and traditional adaptation practices in Rangamati District. Semi-structured and key-informant interviews indicate severe limitations in access to safe drinking water, dependence on springs and lakes, and increasing pressure from drought, watershed degradation, and deforestation. Women face particular burdens in collecting water. The paper emphasizes afforestation, improved upland water management, and locally feasible mitigation strategies.

This article examines the contribution of Bangladesh Police as a first responder during the COVID-19 pandemic and considers how that experience can inform wider disaster-management responsibilities. Police supported lockdown enforcement, public awareness, safe movement, law and order, and humanitarian assistance. The study also identifies constraints involving limited resources, weak inter-agency communication, and insufficient preparedness. It argues that stronger planning, training, technology use, coordination, and institutional readiness can expand the police role in pre-disaster and post-disaster operations.

The paper presents the conceptual and methodological foundation of the MODERSI project, which aims to develop and validate a predictive model of community disaster resilience in Serbia based on social-identity influences. The research combines quantitative face-to-face surveys across municipalities with qualitative semi-structured interviews to investigate how social-identity indicators shape different dimensions of resilience and how disasters influence identity. The intended model and resilience index are designed to support public policy, foresight, preparedness, innovative information systems, and reduction of disaster losses.

This study evaluates COVID-19 risk in Kerala, India, through an integrated GIS-based assessment of hazard and vulnerability. Geo-environmental indicators are analyzed using statistical and geospatial techniques, while hazard is modeled from proximity to hotspots and land-use/land-cover patterns and vulnerability is assessed with the Analytical Hierarchy Process. The resulting risk map identifies very serious, high, medium, and low risk zones and is proposed as a decision-support tool for public-health planning and protection of populations in areas susceptible to future infectious-disease spread.